Without much of a buzz except past leaks suggesting that the company would roll out a beta at this year's Quakecon, AMD released the ATI Catalyst 9.8 WHQL driver suite to readers of the company blog, before formally announcing it and adding it to the AMD Game portal. The package installs drivers for ATI Radeon graphics hardware, including its discrete and integrated graphics processors, AMD 7-series chipsets, and ATI Theater series multimedia products.

With lack of proper documentation (read: release notes) at hand, there are no specifics available about the driver, though one could expect the usual application/hardware/OS-specific enhancement, a possibly expanded supported products list with new SKUs in the Radeon HD 4700/4800 series that surfaced over the last month.

no i looked, no r8xx references. but i did see the new SKU's in there.

and from ive seen i think there may also be OpenGl improvements. Like using GPU caps viewer, its now reporting a geometry shader, and from i remember there wasnt one. I played Quake 4 and it didnt crash on me like it usually did, so they must have done something with the OGL driver.

Support for the X1950 was dropped in 9.2 (or 9.3 can't remember). I don't know if it's 9.8 drivers or I did something without looking, but whenever I watch a movie in VLC it looks kinda odd, like it needs anti-aliasing or something

AMD has released a new set of Catalyst graphics drivers, and there's a twist. The drivers shouldn't hit the AMD Game website until Monday, but AMD marketing chief Ian McNaughton has posted links to them on his blog.

You can grab the drivers right now for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 in their 32-bit and 64-bit variants. We can't link the actual files, though; some sort of anti-leeching technology is afoot. (Oh, and we were asked not to post hard links, too.)

AMD tells us the drivers deliver "enhancements specific to Performance Platforms that improve system performance in CPU bound situations." What does that mean? Well, using a system based on the Dragon platform (so Phenom II, 790GX, and Radeon HD 4800 graphics), the company says it measured considerable gains with multi-GPU configurations running at resolutions of 1680x1050 and higher.

Purportedly, performance can increase by as much as 50% in Far Cry 2, and you can also expect meaty gains in Battleforge, Company of Heroes, Crysis, H.A.W.X., S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and World in Conflict. AMD notes that the gains apply to both conventional CrossFire setups and the single-board Radeon HD 4870 X2.

and from ive seen i think there may also be OpenGl improvements. Like using GPU caps viewer, its now reporting a geometry shader, and from i remember there wasnt one. I played Quake 4 and it didnt crash on me like it usually did, so they must have done something with the OGL driver.

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OpenGL 3.1 seems to be fully supported now and we have GLSL 1.4, at least this is what the last Everest beta is reporting. Now hurry to OGL 3.2&GLSL 1.5 ATI! It's a long way from 10% so go go go!

This month we are seeing a massive performance increase with a whole host of games as compared to the ATI Catalyst 9.7 driver. Detailed release notes are available for most of the game optimizations; here are the highlights:

•Battleforge DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance improves of up to 50% with the largest gains in configurations using ATI CrossFireX™ technology.
•Company of Heroes DirectX 10 performance improves of up to 77%.

•Crysis DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 10% and quad mode performance improves of up to 34%.

•Crysis Warhead DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 7% and quad mode performance improves of up to 69%.
•Far Cry 2 DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 50% and quad mode performance improves of up to 88%.

•Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. DirectX 10/DirectX 10.1 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in dual mode improves of up to 40% and with quad mode performance improving of up to 60%.

•UnigineTropics OpenGL performance improvements of up to 20%.

•UnigineTropics DirectX 10 performance of ATI CrossFireX technology in quad mode improvements of up to 20%.

•World in Conflict DirectX 10 performance improvements of up to by 10%.

This release of the ATI Catalyst driver provides OpenGL 3.1 extension support. The following is a list of OpenGL 3.1 features and extensions added in ATI Catalyst 9.8:

•Primitive restart (NV primitive restart). Because client enable/disable no longer exists in OpenGL 3.1, the PRIMITIVE RESTART state has become server state, unlike the Nvidia extension where it is client state. As a result, the numeric values assigned to PRIMITIVE RESTART and PRIMITIVE RESTART INDEX differ from the NV versions of those tokens. o At least 16 texture image units must be accessible to vertex shaders, in addition to the 16 already guaranteed to be accessible to fragment shaders.

rumor had it (or maybe not rumor just me going crazy) that ATI hired a completely new driver team two driver cycles ago, since then things have been getting better and better so I am inclined to think that its true

Not to rain on their parade, but if you can create drivers with 40 to 50% gains on some of the leading games, on products that have been mostly out for over a year. Well then people do deserve to get fired, because how insanely crappy where the drivers before that.

I think drivers should at least be 80 to 90% of what they can be after 6 month tops.

Only a complete haulover of their driver team could explaine it I think..

Not to rain on their parade, but if you can create drivers with 40 to 50% gains on some of the leading games, on products that have been mostly out for over a year. Well then people do deserve to get fired, because how insanely crappy where the drivers before that.

I think drivers should at least be 80 to 90% of what they can be after 6 month tops.

Only a complete haulover of their driver team could explaine it I think..

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I believe the 50% claim is a far cry from the reality.
Here is 9.7 with 4890/4850 1GB Crossfire setup:
And here is 9.8 with the same 4890/4850 1GB Crossfire setup:

EDIT: It appears the people without Core i7s are seeing the greatest improvement, ie: the min framerate increases. I think this driver release is supposed to improve CPU scaling.
EDIT EDIT: Nevermind, driver release is aimed at pure Crossfire setups or to CPU scaling perhaps?

I honestly don't believe when they made that claim they were specifically targeting mixed CF setups. But talking about traditional CF setups. Besides, you are only showing the 1st run not the average of all 3 runs

I honestly don't believe when they made that claim they were specifically targeting mixed CF setups. But talking about traditional CF setups. Besides, you are only showing the 1st run not the average of all 3 runs

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I usually just Far Cry 2 to run once, just as a quick stability test and clock reference, so there is no average to show.